Igniting Experience that Moves Crowds: Shared Sensations and Kindred Belonging in 13th Century Tibet

This paper challenges the assumption that religious experience is necessarily private and individual by examining mid-thirteenth century tantric Buddhist rituals in Tibet. It analyzes how the Tibetan visionary Guru Chöwang (1212–1270) orchestrated large-scale communal rituals centered on relic pills purportedly incorporating the bodily flesh of the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara to elicit a range of shared experiences. Focusing on two vignettes from Guru Chöwang’s Maṇi Kabum, the paper argues that producing in crowds the sensations of heightened energy, bodily purging, and vulnerability was central to these ceremonies. Applying the kinship theories of Carsten and Sahlins, it interprets the shared sensations generated by the pills and their associated rituals to foster a sense of kindred belonging thought capable of indexing rebirth in a pure land and addressing social fragmentation, epidemic, military threat, and other collective crises of a “degenerate age.”